Random thoughts and notes for 2008
I'm working on a longer entry concerning the state of technology and education, but have a few other random notes/ideas that I want to get down.
1). While I generally find the concept of agonistic pluralism in various forms of "radical democracy" (as especially theorized by Mouffe and Laclau in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy) to be especially interesting and promising, the difficult jump from theory to practice is one that I find most fascinating in that it exposes a strange anti-Americanism rift in academia. If in an agonistic pluralist culture we are to embrace difference as our main mode of civic interaction, then we have to concede that the only way we can do this is to rely on an a priori set of "ground rules" or standards by which we can express our differences in ways that make our differences visible, understandable, and meaningful.
Why this exposes an anti-American rift in academia is that this is a really confusing way of re-inventing what the framers of the United States constitution set out to do by setting up a federal republic. Fearing a direct democracy in which minority rights could be trampled by majority decisions, the framers sought to ensure that all citizens were equal and subject to the laws of the country. Therefore, certain rights were deemed to be unalienable, or above discussion. It is these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that consequently served as the tools of commensurability in which competing or divergent needs, desires, and wants of different groups in society could be understood, evaluated, and discussed.
Yet, to get there, we don't look to Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, etc etc. We instead attempt to re-invent the wheel by going through Marx and a whole slew of other, non-American theorists to arrive at what our country, in many regards, was originally founded on. (And don't even get me started on Marx. John Adams was warning people about merchants and businessmen as early as 1776...some 42 years before Marx was even born).
This leads me to my second winter break thought:
2). Post 1960s/1970s, we've replaced Abe Lincoln with Foucault, John Quincy Adams with Derrida, and Henry Clay with Adorno. What this leads to is a situation in which young students feel no reason to participate in the politics and democracy of their own country. Why should they when every day the message they get is one of relentless criticism of America, even though many of the issues our founders sought to confront and solve are not so different than the ones critical theorists from other countries have commented on. The real danger of this sort of bias in education is that students honestly believe there is no way for them to achieve liberty and equality through the democratic participation in politics, and consequently don't bother. This allows a small minority of those who already are within power to further strengthen their grip on the political mechanisms that drive our country.